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Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?

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f0dder:
But if you're stuck with an old BIOS, you might not be able to toggle the port to hotswap mode
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Write caching may be disabled. But since I'm running Sata III bare drives why would I want to take a performance hit?  I have battery backup on the docks.-MilesAhead (November 21, 2012, 10:07 AM)
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I don't think (esATA) hotswap reduces performance? - I'll have to investigate a bit, though :) Disabling write caching is a definite performance hit, though.

Is your dock USB3 or eSATA? I'd be surprised if an USB connector didn't show up as a removable device.

MilesAhead:
I was talking about sync.exe picking them up as fixed disks. Running it with no params flushes all fixed disks.  That's all. If it does not report flushing the drive letter for the usb when run with no params, you have to specify the drive letter to force it as in
sync F

as I stated earlier

The docks are SIIG USB 3.0.  WD Sata III drives freshly formatted show benchmarks at full speed. I think the fastest rated WD I have is the discontinued 640 GB 64 MB cache model. Sustained transfer is listed at 126 MB/s.  Sequential read/write freshly formatted is 130/138 MB/s Crystal Disk Mark. But CDM considers 1 million bytes a MB for some reason I can't fathom. After all, they have access to a computer to do the math.  :)  But they seem to prefer orders of magnitude.  In any case that comes close to what I'd expect.

I just got a cheap SSD on sale.  I'm using it in the dock for video mux.  Supposedly in a direct Sata III connection it should do 500 MB/s sequential. In the dock I'm getting 170/145 read/write.  But of course the beauty is in the random access.  I can use it for both video source and destination with no thrashing penalty. It's a Kingston. I think they phased it out.. reason for the sale.  But I got a good price.  $70 for 128 GB.  This machine has a plastic cage devised by Satan for the system HD. I saw the video of the tech doing R&R of the drive. Forget it!!  Besides, fast boot isn't the only thing in life. I get good use of the SSD muxing in the dock.  The SSD has the same controller as the other higher priced models. I think the memory is not rated to last as long. Eight years typical use as system disk.

I haven't tried it on W7 yet with the Trim notifications. I'm using it on a Vista machine. But the garbage collector works well enough for my purposes. I did a mux with audio only encode to another video container and I kept killing the job because I changed a setting in the middle and I thought it was picking up the temp file and resuming it was so fast!! I just watch the progress bar go across.

MilesAhead:
In fact, now that I remember... sync.exe isn't picking up on the write caching. I had the caching disabled for a time and it still flushed them by default. It was last updated in 2006. It probably uses disk capacity to make assumptions.  But since it only uses volume lock API call on NT and later I have no qualms using it still. The SysInternals stuff always seemed pretty solid to me. :)

Tinman57:
  I came across this article tonight, perhaps it will shed a little more light on the subject:

What's the best file system for an external drive?
Cyberknight asked the Hard Drives, NAS Drives, Storage forum if a new flash drive should be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013758/whats-the-best-file-system-for-an-external-drive.html

BearPup7:
There was a PCWorld Answer Line forum in recent days that talked about the drive writing problem with NTFS file systems on flash drives. Because of the excessive writing NTFS drives do, I reformatted my 16 Gb drives to FAT32, with 512 Kb allocation unit sizing. That takes care of the problem.

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